Dear Marion,

A week ago today I went to Nantucket, just for the day, sixteen hours
of travel for a mere 4 1/2 hours at the house, a somewhat tiring
expedition, but satisfactory and satisfying nonetheless, a trip
into the past, a rediscovery and recapitulation of the remarkable
manner in which I spent the second half of the eighth decade of
my life. Inspection confirmed what the surveillance cameras seemed
to have shown from day to day: the house was intact, the old
broken-down Dodge parked in the driveway, its tires still inflated.
Inside, the floors were littered with small gray rice-sized grains,
almost as if there had been a wedding, - I suppose the debris which
spiders leave behind when they escape from the egg, but not being
an entomologist, I don't really know. I used the shop vacuum cleaner
to improve appearances, put this and that in better order, and
enjoyed the warmth of the passive solar heating, which made the
house so comfortable that I didn't need to plug in any of the
electric heaters. A large bottle of ginger ale and sandwiches which
I had brought along were all the food I needed. I checked the
surveillance system, adjusted one of the video cameras, and looked at
my e-mail. There was none. The taxi for the 6 mile trip to the wharf
came 15 minutes early. The driver, not only an off-islander, but a
genuine foreigner with an accent that made him almost unintelligble
to my deaf ears, promised to put me in touch with a friend who would
repair my car, and pleaded with me, when I was ready, to hire him for
the finish carpentry on the house, because work on the Island is now
so hard to come by. The crossing was remarkable only for the low
temperature and the cold draft in the lounge. I had a book along,
but there was so much to think about, I didn't get it out. 
The drive from Hyannis to Belmont was easy because the highway had
been newly resurfaced and was brightly marked with white and yellow
lines, obviating the need for anxious identification of the edge of
the pavement. My next trip should be scheduled for the beginning of
February, which seems, as of now, a long time hence.

Nathaniel and Rebekah have been home for the Thanksgiving week.
All four grandchildren seem more attentive and affectionate than
seems warranted considering their grandparents' decrepitude. Rebekah
has stopped scowling at me for my unconventional disposition; my
litigation, my religious abstinence, my medical scepticism had made
her subacutely uncomfortable; but I think she's come to understand in
the past year that there's some consistency to my attitudes. Nathaniel
came over and spent about two hours with me, first to listen to the
the first two scenes of die Meistersinger, - he's become interested
in Wagner, and agonized over Wagner's antisemitism. In response
I wrote him a letter summarizing my thoughts; I have forwarded a copy
to you. Then he wanted to listen to die Matthaeus Passion with me.
I can't assay the extent of his interest in the music as distinct
from his interest in making me happy. We listened to about a third
of the work, following my photolithograph of the 1854 edition which
Margaret bought for me many many years ago, before we were married.

Then there was Thanksgiving Dinner, a tradition with Klemens' inlaws,
to which until last year, Margaret and I had never been invited,
because it was always held at the houses of relatives who did not
consider us family. Yesterday it was next door. Laura (my daughter-in-law)
sent Leah over with three pies to bake in our oven. The three of us,
my sister, Margaret and I were invited. A  big crowd. 25 people,
few of whom I knew, but very friendly. Laura's parents have been dead
for several years; but her uncle Lionel Perlo, a very successful
medical malpractice defense lawyer, was there. We like to talk to
each other; Lionel's wife has had terrible bilateral retinal detachment.
There was much to discuss, not all of it happy. Nathaniel wanted to try
out some of his newly acquired German. He's less ebullient than he was
at the beginning of the semester. His grandfather's brothers', Lionel's 
daughter who is a successful business woman in the New Haven vicinity has
introduced Nathaniel to Buddhism. He won't let on how seriously he
takes it; but perhaps because ignorance is bliss, I consider it safer
than Roman Catholicism or Jewish orthodoxy. - Please forgive my
prejudices. Benjamin decided he wanted to learn German too, and to
start learning it right then and there. He demanded a German lesson
in the midst of twenty-five chattering turkey eaters. But I rose to
the occasion and we started naming objects, die Wand, die Decke,
das Fenster, der Teppich - was about as far as we got. Friday morning
he came over for more. We started with an old Berlitz manual. I
told Benjamin he should memorize, I offered him a bilingual edition
of Faust, which he rejected, the translations of Genesis 1 by Luther
and Moses Mendelssohn. Luther's version is more poetic, Mendelssohn's
more scholarly, but Benjamin rejected both. He finally settled on
Schiller's Ode to Joy, which he knows from Beethoven's Ninth,
I downloaded the text from the Internet and started an interlinear
translation for him. I doubt that Benjamin will continue his German
studies for very long, if at all. We'll see.

Music is yet another instrumentality of communication.
Inasmuch as the musical composition has an existence of
its own, independent of all participants, it ought not to
be held to convey sentiment from one person to another,
rather it resonates in the audience with "a responsive chord",
and all who hear it are presumably moved by analogous if not
identical emotions. So also the Schalling chorale with which
Bach concludes die Johannispassion. I assume that as he usually
does, Bach harmonizes a familiar church melody in his own monumental
style, - but I don't really know. That closing chorale has for years
now impressed me as an antithesis, - maybe even an antidote of 
simplicity and humility to the baroque extravagance of the
non-scriptural portion of the ornate text written by Barthold
Heinrich Brockes, which, - as Wikipedia informs me - has been set to
music also by Haendel and Telemann. In any event, music establishes
and confirms a community of Erleben even more emphatically than does
poetry.

Your inquiry about Margaret's and my possibly watching DVD or
Videocassette recordings puts me to shame: I haven't watched any
television shows, except for Wiseman's documentary on La Comedie
Francaise decades ago. I haven't been to more than five or six movies
in all of my 79 1/2 years, the last one perhaps thirty years ago. 
Culturally I am a savage, but I don't boast, and I'm not proud
of it.  My computer, of course, has DVD capacity, but we have no
videocassette recorder, and until a week ago, there was not even
a functioning television set in the house. Last Sunday, I extracted
from one of our closets a large hand-me-down television receiver of
Laura's (my daughter-in-laws') parents' which Klemens stored with
us after their deaths. From Amazon.com I had bought a converter box
and an amplifying aerial, all of which I assembled in Margrit's room.
The system works fantastically well, receiving no fewer than 15
television channels with clarity such as I had never seen. Margrit
is appreciative and watches occasionally, but usually, when I stop
by in her room, I find her reading.

Whether Margaret and I live frugally or extravagantly, is a matter
of perspective. On clothing, food, and heat for the house and medical
expenses, we spend very little. On concert, theatre and movie tickets,
restaurant meals, ocean cruises, legal fees and retirement homes,
on plumbing, wiring, carpentry, except for roof replacement, we
spend nothing at all. But since I am a collector of real estate: the
house in Belmont, the house in Konnarock, the house on Nantucket and
an abandoned 65 acre farm in Lisbon NH, there are sufficient real
estate taxes to take up the slack. It's not stinginess and it's not
cultural snobbery that keeps me from watching tv, movies, video-cassettes
or DVD's - its lack of time, lack of intellectual and emotional energy.
It's preoccupation with myself that makes me want to squeeze out of
what remains of my life, as out of a moldy tired lemon, every drop of
hypothetical creativity that remains. Even now, I should be thinking
and writing to you about my novel, - and I will.

It's Saturday evening in the Katenus Mansion on Main Street on the
Island. Elly, Katenus, Mengs and Joachim have long since finished
their elegant candle-lit dinner, Joachim and Elly have cleared the
dining room table, brushing away the last few crumbs, and Katenus
has poured each of them and himself another glass of Moselwein. The
candles have all been extinguished, permeating the room with that
peculiar scent which wax exudes as it cools. The incandescent bulbs
of the chandelier suspended from the ceiling are now brightly lit,
filling the four wine glasses with a golden glow, and cast sharp shadows
of their crystal stems onto the table cloth and the four thin volumes
of Das siebte Kapitel which Elly has spread out before the participants
of this impromptu literature seminar. The four participants contemplate 
Doehring on the height of Banff Avenue bridge gazing into the foaming 
torrents of the Bow River. Incongruously the word "Bruecke" brings to 
Jonathan's mind Nietzsche's poem about the view of the lagoon from a
bridge in Venice:

An der Bruecke stand
juengst ich in brauner Nacht.
Fernher kam Gesang:
goldener Tropfen quoll's
ueber die zitternde Flaeche weg.
Gondeln, Lichter, Musik -
trunken schwamm's in die Daemmrung hinaus ...

Meine Seele, ein Saitenspiel,
sang sich, unsichtbar beruehrt,
heimlich ein Gondellied dazu,
zitternd vor bunter Seligkeit.
- Hoerte jemand ihr zu? ...

Mengs was silent. It came to him suddenly that quoting this poem
was most inappropriate. It had nothing to do with das siebte Kapitel.
"I must apologize," he began, "More than that, I'm ashamed for having
quoted this poem in so incongruous a context." "Oh, not at all,"
Katenus said intending relieve the embarrassment of his guest.
"But yes," Mengs persisted, "this poem is totally out of place,
and no imagination, however adventurous, will succeed in translating
the spirits of this errant teacher of literature, gazing into the
foaming water of a Canadian mountain torrent into a harp plucked
by invisible hands. And the rushing current is anything but a
tremulous lagoon on which gondolas, lights and music fade,
as if in dunken stupor, into the twilight, if only because
we are told when Doehring stood on that bridge, the sun was
still high in the heavens."

"You are too stern with yourself," it was Elly's voice
which offered the apology. "A poem of such magical beauty as this
is never out of place. Consider it in the framework of an esthetic
dialectic as an antithesis and an eminently appropriate foil
to the portrait of the disillusioned academician who hears the
echo of his fate in the rushing and roaring mountain stream."
"Let no one underestimate my darling Elly." It was Katenus'
voice, all tenderness and admiration. "Elly understands more
about literature than many an academician who professes to
be a specialist in the subject." "My dear and beloved Katenus,"
said Elly, her voice tranquil as ever. "You have always been,
you are now, and forever will be, an impossibility. I love
you nonetheless. Jonathan Mengs is our guest. Properly we
should call him Professor Mengs. His field is literature,
and I, I'm nothing more than a simple unassuming housekeeper,
whose knowledge and whose judgment can't hold a candle to his."
"Repeat it, Elly, Say it once more," Katenus laughed. "Your
fairy tales have such magic. You're such a beautiful liar."
That's probably the style, Joachim said to himself, but
silently, in which these two customarily talk to each other.
Joachim thought it was wonderful, and he asked himself whether
so confident and affectionate a relationship between himself
and Charlotte would ever be possible.

===================

At this juncture, I must stop, because I've lapsed into a
translation on which I mustn't spend any more time. The
fragment of Chapter 39 on which I'm presently working is
posted on my website. I hope you have better things to do
than to read it.

Jochen